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More Than Words: The Effect of Emoticons in Electronic Negotiations

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Outlooks and Insights on Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 218))

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Abstract

While affect plays a similar fundamental role in both, electronic and face-to-face negotiations, the expression of emotions in computer-mediated communication differs considerably from face-to-face settings. The aim of this experimental study is to analyze how the systematic use of emoticons – facilitated with software – affects negotiation behavior in alternative computer-mediated negotiation settings. With a 2 × 2 design comparing system-induced emoticon use with a text-only condition in synchronous chat or asynchronous e-mail mode we isolate effects of emoticons in these different communication settings. Results show that emoticons are used in different functions, i.e. mainly to supplement and support text messages and less often to mitigate its content. Furthermore, emoticon support increases the communication of positive affect in asynchronous negotiations while it decreases communication of negative affect and distributive negotiation behavior in synchronous negotiations. These findings propose that advancing communication quality via contextualization of affective information in negotiation support systems is promising.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are hundreds of emoticons which have been catalogued in dictionaries and on Websites (e.g. Wikipedia).

  2. 2.

    All reported post-hoc tests in our manuscript are 2-tailed and based on bootstrapping, n = 1000, using either Bonferroni or Games-Howell comparisons in case that the Levene test indicates a violation of homogeneity of variances, p < .05.

  3. 3.

    Testing the assumption of normality, all relative subcategories show significant deviations from normality. To cope with the skewed data, we apply a Box Cox transformation anchoring all values at 1 and using a λ of −6.5. The transformation of the data is rendered necessary as initial calculations of F-values in MANOVAs are not supported by bootstrapping.

  4. 4.

    Checking the assumptions of MANOVA, the Box’s Test of equality of covariance matrices indicates a violation of the assumption of equality of covariance matrices (p < .000). Furthermore, the Levene test indicates that the assumption of equality for error variances is violated for several communication categories.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Ronny Mitterhofer for the programming of the N-Swan system used in the experiment. Furthermore, we want to thank Evelyn Braumann, Olga Preveden, Sharjeel Saleem and Ying Xu for their contribution to data coding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Interorganisational Management and Performance, University of Hohenheim, 70593, Stuttgart, Germany

    Johannes Gettinger

  2. Institute of Management Science, Vienna University of Technology, 1040, Vienna, Austria

    Sabine T. Koeszegi

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  1. Johannes Gettinger
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  2. Sabine T. Koeszegi
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Correspondence to Johannes Gettinger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland

    Bogumił Kamiński

  2. Concordia University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Gregory E. Kersten

  3. Warsaw School of Economics, Warsaw, Poland

    Tomasz Szapiro

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Gettinger, J., Koeszegi, S.T. (2015). More Than Words: The Effect of Emoticons in Electronic Negotiations. In: Kamiński, B., Kersten, G., Szapiro, T. (eds) Outlooks and Insights on Group Decision and Negotiation. GDN 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 218. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19515-5_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19515-5_23

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